Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Archive...

I'll need this, since there are so many people who like this sort of argument: "I think evolution is true because I'm being scientific right now or somethin'. It's all just like gravity. I did just say the word gravity so that means I am being scientific....or somethin' and so disagreement with me is just like disagreeing with science."

One is supposed to begin to assume that Darwinism is "just like" gravity or some other well established knowledge/scientia. Darwinists seem very fond of shifting into "just like" arguments (examples)instead of dealing with the application of systematic thought and empirical evidence to the sort of mythological narratives of Naturalism promulgated by popularizers like PBS.

But very well, if Darwinism is "just like" physics or some other form of science that actually comports with the empirical evidence instead of either mutating to fit itself to it or forming the evidence to fit to itself, then what is the well established metric for natural selection? What is the equation for Darwinism's most basic and foundational tenet? Shouldn't such equations be learned by every student of biology? Is Darwinism “just like” a form of knowledge that is so well established by empirical evidence that any anomalies ought to be fit to the theory, at least for now? These “just like” associative arguments that Darwinists are so fond of seem to reveal that they actually can’t track and predict the destination of an adaptation “just like” the trajectory of a physical object can be traced given gravity and physics. What is the mathematical language that represents natural selection and makes predictions that can be falsified or verified, about as sure as gravity? Given the incessant attempt at an association, aren’t Darwinian principles as sure as gravity and as verifiable as tracing the trajectory of an object before it is set in motion? Do Darwinists think that physicists sit around after an object comes to rest and then write an equation or perhaps a little story about how Nature selected it to be there by supposed "natural selections" operating in ways that are unverifiable? Is Darwinism on the same epistemic level as theories that make predictions and have been repeatedly tested and encoded in the precise language of mathematics, or not? What equation represents the notion of natural selection, what trajectory of adaptation has it predicted and how has it been verified by empirical evidence? All of such questions are easy to answer in physics with respect to gravity's impact on physical objects and Darwinism is incessantly said to be on the same epistemic level. Given that, Darwinists should be able to make predictions about the adaptations found in living organisms and so have an actual theory subject to falsification. Yet it has been my experience that they can't and instead begin to make excuses about how complex living things and their relationships are. Yet if they can't, they should have never made the argument about their hypotheses being on the same epistemic level as the theory of gravity in the first place.